


In Respect to the Final Sound

by Culumacilinte



Category: The Worst Journey in the World - All Media Types
Genre: Historical, M/M, POV First Person, Self-Esteem Issues, Shaving, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-06
Updated: 2014-09-06
Packaged: 2018-02-16 08:16:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2262453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Culumacilinte/pseuds/Culumacilinte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The ruckus of the continued laughter and conversation bled through the walls as I fetched the necessary items: shave brush, soap and mug and razor. Preparing that familiar ritual of years seemed strange under my inexpert hands; they should be more at ease now, I thought, pitching a tent or scrabbling vainly at pressure ridges in the dark.</i>
</p><p>Cherry and Birdie return from the Winter Journey.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Respect to the Final Sound

**Author's Note:**

> So this is something I started, and subsequently left off, nearly four years ago. On impulse, I cleaned it up and finished it, and here it is!

We had arrived, finally, back at the base at Cape Evans, and the men were all jubilant to see us return successful, with three Emperor eggs for our troubles. It seemed an incomparably strange thing, at the time, stepping into the hut in our iced furs, balaclavas soldered to our faces with frost and our own breath, frozen to a smooth sheen of ice, to be met with that pleasant and temperate warmth. We could not wait the length of time our clothes would have required to thaw, and so Atkinson and Crean were forced to cut us out of them with a tin opener. It was, I imagine, very much like cutting through iron plate must be, and once they had fallen in pieces to the floor, we nearly gasped at the sudden assault of heat. One almost forgets after a month of constant, numbing cold, what temperatures above freezing even feel like.

They do say that the real pain of frostbite comes later, when the blood flow reasserts itself in the frozen extremities. They are quite right; I had to clamp my sleeve in what teeth I had left to keep from bellowing as arteries filled and warmed, the blood bringing with it the sensation to perceive the pain I was in. It was like white-hot knives were slid beneath my skin. Once the worst of the agony had abated, though, I was left with warmth, and whilst the joints of my fingers were stiff and frozen, I already could tell I had greater dexterity with them than I’d had for weeks. Not that that was saying much.

Once Bill, Birdie and myself had got out of our underthings, stiff with the salt of weeks of frozen sweat, and changed into thick, clean jumpers and woollen socks, we sat down at the great wooden table with our fellows. Titus Oates had made cocoa-- with sugar. Not too much, although the temptation to overindulge was a great one. The men inundated us with questions; Captain Scott serious and intent, Titus all enthused to hear about our adventure (although he did his utmost to appear as if he could hardly care less), and Grif Taylor and the rest keen for a taste of something other than the sitting about they’d been doing since we packed in. Bill answered steadfast and plain, his speech very much like he himself, and Birdie avidly pulled out his diary and records. He laughed as he spoke of the rookery at Cape Crozier, and how we had chased the penguins like a triad of Arctic sheepdogs in order to procure our precious eggs.

As for myself, I said little, save sometimes to corroborate a detail, or if a direct question was posed to me. I am not generally a man for crowds, but with these men who had become my comrades, I had developed an easiness and pleasure in their company such that they might simply have been an extension of myself. But now, I was content to sit and nurse my cocoa gingerly; if I was not careful, the hot liquid scalded the naked, frostbitten gum where I had lost teeth. I suppose the frank truth is that I did not feel the returning hero that Bill and Birdie were. Everything of import which had been accomplished on that hideous journey was down to them; I had scarcely done anything-- and indeed when I had, it had been a hindrance.

The chatter went on for some time, with everyone in uncommonly high spirits. It was churlish of me, that my smiles came brittle and forced, but I simply could not find the festivity that the rest revelled in. Even in the warm hut, it seemed that the Antarctic cold lingered in my bones and sinews, rendering me frozen and hollow.

Bill was in the process of detailing the results of the rationing experiment when my right hand strayed agitatedly to my chin. Over the past month, I had sprouted a set of coarse, gingery whiskers; the hair was wiry and alien under my fingers. Out on the ice, a man had no choice but to let his beard grow; one could no more shave than enjoy a daily bath. Now, though, I was seized by the sudden, urgent desire to be rid of it. I would feel more myself, I was sure, once I had cleaned myself up somewhat. Now it had occurred to me, the urge was like an itch, like something with legs and claws under my clothes setting my nerves quite on edge, but I waited until the conversation had reached a natural lull before I excused myself and fled the room.

No-one, I think, thought much of it.

The ruckus of the continued laughter and conversation bled through the walls as I fetched the necessary items: shave brush, soap and mug and razor. Preparing that familiar ritual of years seemed strange under my inexpert hands; they should be more at ease now, I thought, pitching a tent or scrabbling vainly at pressure ridges in the dark.

My face in the small, square mirror was strange to me; the eyes were tired, and the lines under them purple with bruising, and gouged deep into the skin. My beard bristled white with shaving foam, and I had a momentary, morbid fancy of myself as an old, haggard man. It would be as well to be rid of that.

The razor lay where I’d put it beside the soapy shaving brush and mug, and I went to fetch it. It took a moment to persuade my stiff, scarred fingers to close around the handle, and even when I was able to, my hand shook. Involuntary muscle tremors, induced no doubt by malnutrition and exhaustion and stress, and I tightened my grip, my jaw clenching. The shaking only increased, but I was determined that I should continue as I started, and lifted the blade to my cheek. At the first stroke, I cursed; my trembling fingers could not sustain their grasp, and I dropped the razor against the sink with a dissonant clang. There was, I saw, a line of bright blood just under my cheekbone, welling like carmine glass beads to where the blade had slipped. Immediately, I grabbed for the instrument again, but it shot from my clumsy grasp, and instead I bowed over the sink, my hands made steady by their Atlas’s grip on the table edges.

I was overwhelmed, for a moment, by the blunt realisation of my own uselessness. I have, of course, already discussed the matter of my many failures on our journey to Cape Crozier; the eggs I had broken, my foolishness in taking off my mitts, my persistent, weakening will whilst my companions seemed only to grow stronger, but now I could not so much as shave myself, a task any lad of fifteen could undertake with ease.

I was, I’m afraid, so distracted by my own thoughts that I neglected to notice the sounds of somebody else entering the room. Until he spoke, in fact, I remained entirely oblivious to his presence.

‘Cherry...?’

It was Birdie Bowers.  

Birdie was fond of watching; he kept meticulous records, transcribing the figures from the atmospheric measurements he took, as well as anything else which might have happened to catch his notice. He was much the same with people, or so it seemed to me; though he was always pleased to be a part of any group, possessed of enough companionable zeal for three men, he kept his words for when they were necessary, preferring instead to simply track the conversation, watching and listening. Perhaps, I had sometimes fancied, he kept a mental diary of all us men, filled in in neat rows and columns.

We had become great pals on the _Terra Nova_ , even if I hadn’t always quite understood him, but he had since grown into the best, dearest kind of friend. If you have lived all your life comfortably, in the streets and armchairs and businesses and universities of civilisation, you have no method of comparison, but I tell you, there is no way so sure of forging a true, lasting bond with a man than by nearly dying with him. That was the kind of friend Birdie was now, standing at the mouth of the room and watching me.  

My cheeks heated, and I hastily dropped into a crouch, snatching up the razor with a mind to continue on, but Birdie was there first. One of his hands curled around my wrist; I paused.  His skin was quite warm; the mug, I expected, that he’d been cupping between his palms. It was the first time I had touched bare human skin in thirty-five days. We were both kneeling on the wooden planking of the floor, Birdie regarding me baldly, and when I cleared my throat and stood, he followed. For a moment, it seemed as though he was going to ask what I had been doing, and I was profoundly grateful when instead he said,

‘You’re lucky you didn’t cut your throat open. Look at your hands, man; you could barely hold a mug out there, much less a razor.' He took the razor and placed it aside, turning one of my hands over in his and frowning at it. ‘Surely you could have waited.’

There was no answer for that; I could not satisfactorily explain the encompassing urge I had experienced, the near visceral compulsion. There was, after all, no real reason I could not have waited until I was more capable; this had been nothing other than a foolish exercise in self-indulgence. In Birdie’s face, though, there was no condemnation, merely fondness and exasperation. His own beard was not nearly as thick as mine; though several years my elder, he resembled nothing so much as a boy growing his first whiskers.

Another thing which must be noted about Birdie Bowers is that he has the most singularly happy smile I have ever seen on anyone, man or woman. A smile is, of course, by its very nature an expression of happiness, but Birdie’s is like the Ideal of the thing, for those familiar with the philosophies of Plato. One imagines all the joy in the world expressed in that curving of lips and slice of white teeth; it makes his eyes glitter like coals. It’s the sort of smile which cannot help but inspire the same feeling in others, I think; it warms, engenders a blush of heat in the pit of the stomach. I had, over the past month, grown much to rely on Birdie’s smiles.

It was not unexpected, then, when the warmth of blood welled in my cheeks when Birdie smiled now. He laughed along with it, shaking his head as if at some private joke. ‘God, Cherry. I’ll do it for you, if you’re so dead set, you daftie.’

‘Beg pardon?’ said I.

Birdie’s grin twinkled at me again, and he plucked up the razor, twirling it between his fingers. ‘Shave. It’s no hardship on me. I’ll bet you’ve had someone shave your face for you before, posh bloke like you.’

‘I-- by all means,’ I ejaculated after a moment’s hideous silence.

Were it anyone else, I would have declined. In truth, I probably should have done so in this instance as well, but I find I have an exceedingly difficult time refusing Birdie anything. If it had been another man, I think I should have felt embarrassed, beholden, my own inadequacies further emphasised by the condescension of the favour. With Birdie, it was only kindness.

Still, as he applied the first cold stroke of the blade to my cheek, I found I daren’t look down at him.

I have always been something of a romantic. It is, I know, a dreadful quality for a scientist to possess, but it is an aspect of my character of which I have long been aware and come to terms with, in my way. It is my proclivity towards romance, after all, which took me on my jaunts around the world in earlier years. Now, as I stared up at the low ceiling, I imagined this as some kind of absolution for a sin Birdie himself would never name, but which came only too easily to me.

Outside the hut, the wind muttered and rumbled, and the sounds of the other men bled through the wall, but as far as I was concerned, the only sounds as Birdie worked were the scrape of the razor and our combined breaths. It occurred to me, absently, that this was the first time in more than a month that breathing was not a tangible, visible process; I had watched Birdie’s breath mist before him and freeze to his clothes for an eternity of winter, silent against the howling of wind and the groaning of continental ice. Now it was quite the opposite. As for my own, it seemed to be catching queerly in my chest, as if I’d just run miles and was trying to seem as if I hadn’t.

‘Up,’ Birdie murmured presently, and I startled out of my reverie of thought.

‘Pardon?’ I looked down at him, caught quite off-guard. His eyes were very blue. Or perhaps I was simply noticing anew, after being forced to make due in permanent dusk without my spectacles for so long.

‘Chin up,’ he repeated himself. ‘I need to get your neck. Unless you fancy a beard there and nowhere else.’ The tips of three of his fingers prodded at my jaw, and obediently, I tilted my chin up. My eyes slid shut with the motion as gently, Birdie applied the razor to the hinge of jaw just under my ear. The touch, for all the metal was cold and sharp, felt very nearly like a caress.

The repetition of the razor strokes against the thin skin was curiously mesmeric, lulling as waves of exhaustion, and I felt, somehow, as I stood there with my eyes closed and feet rooted to the floor, as though I were being... pulled back into my body. Some vital part of me, my spirit, perhaps, funnelled down from wherever the Winter Journey had left it, drawn into me through the firm grip of Birdie’s fingers on my chin, the heat of his nearness and the sound of his breathing.

I felt _warm_.

‘There we go!’ Birdie was cheery and indelicate as always as he patted my cheek with the air of an artist finishing off his magnum opus. The newly shaven skin was incredibly sensitive; in his hand against my cheek, I could feel each of the individual calluses, hardened from frostbite and pulling. Looking down at him, for a moment that fluttered in my newly-warm chest like the aurora, I wanted nothing more than to kiss him.

Needless to say, of course, I did not, but my treacherous hands twitched up in an abortive impulse to touch, pulled awkwardly back before I might make even more of an idiot of myself. As if I had a chance of hiding anything from ever-observant Birdie.

‘I do apologise,’ I said stiltedly, fearing what he might have seen on my face, 'Thank you.' But Birdie only reached up to hook his hand around the back of my skull, bringing our foreheads together in a gesture that just shied from being a headbutt, his other hand at my shoulder in a hard grip.

‘Och, Cherry,’ he murmured. ‘You need a rest.’ And then the smile was back in full force, quite unquenchable. ‘You can sleep for a week if you like! And then real food when you wake up, imagine it; real veg, bread, tongue, a _pie_ ; Soldier can badger Clissold into making us a pudding.’

For all Birdie had never complained of tiring of hoosh and biscuit on the journey, he trailed off longingly at the thought of pudding. Though I was no less affected-- I suspected we were both thinking of the pineapple and raspberry jellies Clissold had made for our Midwinter Dinner, had it really been only a month and a half past?-- it made me laugh. ‘I’m not sure I’d trust Titus with the job.’

With the hand on my shoulder, Birdie cuffed me amiably, and it was all I could do, for a moment, to smile at him, desperately grateful and fond.

He left me with a swift, rough embrace, and another injunction to go get some rest. All the jittering, crawling energy had left me, replaced by a sort of hollow heaviness, the kind of deep ache that comes after exhaustion or tears, and I thought for the first time since returning that I _could_ sleep. It would be the easiest thing in the world, the indulgence of a bunk and real wood walls around me and no threat that I might not wake up. It is the way of extreme fatigue that one reaches a point where one is able to continue through it simply because rest is not an option; it becomes inconceivable. Now, with the option available to me, I swayed on the spot, suddenly dizzy for want of sleep.

I did sleep, long and well, and when I awoke, I shaved for myself, holding tight to the secret memory of Birdie’s fingers on my face.


End file.
